My last post (2 June 2016) described the physical character of Stafford when Irish people sought refuge there during the Famine. Although superficially an attractive rural town, we saw that Stafford had many gloomy areas where most of the Irish were forced to settle. This post digs a little deeper into the conditions that the poor and destitute had to endure and the often ineffectual or damaging attempts by the borough council to deal with things.

Stafford had had Improvement Commissioners since a local Improvement Act of 1830 but they achieved little beyond some street works because the commissioners were unwilling to raise the rates or interfere with the rights of property owners. In my last post Dr Edward Knight’s description of the sanitary state of Stafford in 1842 showed the squalid state of things.[1] The arrival of the Famine Irish in 1847 stirred the councillors out of their lethargy but the results were limited and skewed as we shall see. They were not generally bothered about the state of the slum houses themselves. The sanctity of private property had to be preserved. The council’s main concern was the externalities imposed by the slums, particularly the impact of sanitary ‘nuisances’ and potential disease on nearby residents in this closely packed town. The medical profession was alarmed and in June 1847 Dr Walter Fergus from the Infirmary was writing about the impact of ‘Irish fever’ which he said was ‘no more Irish than it is the companion of famine and want of attention to cleanliness’. [2] In November he drew attention to results of the year’s events in terms of the ‘enormous quantity’ of mortality in the town, much higher than the national average and not far off that in Liverpool.[3] The Council’s response was (inevitably) to set up a committee ‘to inspect from time to time the sanitary state of the borough’. [4]

Action was still slow to come but evidence expands on the actual conditions facing Stafford’s slum dwellers. We saw in the last post that the houses in the poorer parts of the town were usually either decrepit cottages often dating back to the 17th century or jerry-built dwellings built since the 1770s. They were small, frequently just two rooms, and many had no proper water supply or sanitation. Even so, middle class commentators often blamed the poor for their wretched conditions. Mr Wogan, surgeon at the Infirmary, said ‘there were back streets in the town inhabited by some who preferred living in dirt to habits of cleanliness’. Nevertheless, he went on to report that ‘some’ of the poor in Back Walls North were forced to get their drinking water from the foetid ditch behind the houses that received a good part of the town’s raw sewage. They had no other supply.[5] When cholera returned to England in 1849 it is not surprising that Staffordians feared it would strike their town. They were lucky – it never did – but councillors worried about the danger of the ‘open privies, cesspools, filthy drains and crowded houses’ of the town even though the source of the disease in polluted water was yet to be demonstrated. The Council’s only remedy was, however, to distribute chloride of lime ‘to the poor people who applied for it’.[6] It also established a new Sanitary Committee with powers of inspection and ‘abatement’.[7]

In 1850 the Watch Committee of the Council turned its attention to ‘four houses in Eastgate Street inhabited by Irish families, part of which were in the most filthy state, none of them having back doors nor any place of convenience’.[8] The squalor of back yards being used as general latrines can be imagined. One of those issued with a notice for the ‘removal of nuisances’ was James Concur (sic.) from the Galway family whose story I told in a number of posts in 2015 (e.g. 11 August and 13 October 2015). Elizabeth – or Betty – Maguire was another Irish person served with notice, but two of the houses in Eastgate Street occupied by the Irish were in fact leased by Staffordian landlords, William Ecclestone and Joseph Weaver.[9] At the hearing a total of five English landlords were named to the authorities for allowing ‘nuisances’ on their premises which shows how the sufferings of the Irish were a source of profit to local property holders. The Council ordered the landlords to remove the nuisances but nothing was done to rectify the basic problems and conditions remained appalling for the residents.

In 1853 the Improvement Commissioners set up a Board of Health and yet more surveys were done of housing conditions. The reporter for the west side of the town centre, Mr Williams, reported that the area was ‘in a very unsatisfactory and unwholesome condition; the privies and piggeries were very bad and many of the dwellings of the lower class were in a most wretched and filthy state, several of them never having been cleansed with whitewash for up to ten years. …. The cesspools were badly constructed …. and were a continual nuisance.’ Alderman Boulton said that in the east side of the town centre there was an ‘entire absence in some of the dwellings … of any back premises … and another great nuisance was the draining of many of the privies into the Thieves Ditch. …. The water of the greater number of the pumps in the Back Walls was not fit to drink.’[10]

The area near the gasworks was particularly bad. In September 1854 effluent from the works was reportedly impregnating the soil and tainting the water. Cesspools were overflowing and Mr Bagnall complained about the ‘discharging the contents of cesspools into the channel of the street opposite his house. He said the stench was intolerable and … he had himself seen night soil floating in the channel.’[11]

Despite this lurid evidence, in the same month the Health Committee rather smugly received reports that ‘the sanitary condition of the district was much better than formerly’. The only exception, it was claimed, was Allen’s Court near the Vine Inn ‘inhabited by Irish labourers and which was said to be in a most filthy state.’ The landlord’s agent was ordered to cleanse the court which he seems to have done after being remanded by the town’s magistrates. It was said that the property in Allen’s Court was to be shortly be pulled down, with the implication that the problem would then disappear.[12] Allen’s Court in fact survived as a slum inhabited by Irish people and their descendants down into the twentieth century!

The main Council response to the Irish refugees proved to be the harassment of the operators of the lodging houses in which most were forced to find shelter. In August 1849 the Council adopted bye-laws (operative from October) that required the registration of lodging houses, imposed limits on maximum occupancy and other requirements, and gave powers to inspect premises. In the following years Irish lodging house keepers were frequently brought before the Mayor and magistrates for contravening these regulations.

A classic example was in August 1850 when ‘several Irish lodging house keepers in Lloyd’s Square were brought before the Mayor …. charged …. with keeping their houses in a filthy condition and allowing in several instances as many as sixteen individuals to sleep together in one room, contrary to the borough bye-laws. The defendants were severely reprimanded and ordered to pay the costs.’[13] Lloyd’s Square was better known as Plant’s Square and we have been there before in this blog (2 June 2016, 28 July 2015). It was a court of nine tiny 2-room cottages in Stafford’s north end with a pump and a row of reeking privies. The Irish may have paid the costs but nothing changed in the Square. In the 1851 Census 63 people were crammed into the five hovels that were clearly operating as lodging houses.

Plant’s Square is shown just above and to the left of ‘Cross’ (Street) on this 1:500 OS plan of Stafford in 1881. Note how it was crammed in adjacent to other relatively superior houses with gardens, an example of the complex social geography of the town. The plan shows the privies and pump & trough serving the yard.

The Plant’s Square lodging house keepers were summoned again in February 1851 ‘for keeping their houses in a filthy and unwholesome state’ and with the same results. At the same time Thomas Rafferty (or Raftery) and Patrick Walsh from Allen’s Court were issued with costs for not registering their lodging houses.[14] In June others were fined for having more people in their houses than the certificated number.[15]

Harassment of Irish lodging house keepers was, of course, doing nothing to solve the desperate housing needs of Irish refugees – it was making their problems worse. Although the response of Stafford’s elite to the influx of Famine refugees was muted and there was very little overt hostility to the Irish generally in the town, action against Irish lodging house keepers clearly stigmatised them as a troublesome group to be kept in check. In my next post I shall explore the role and significance of Irish lodging houses in Stafford at time of the Famine and its aftermath.

[1]Parliamentary Papers, 1842 (007), Commission on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain: Local reports on England: No. 15: “On the Sanitary State of the Town of Stafford” by Dr. Edward Knight, pp. 225-6.

My last post (6 January 2016) looked at some of the ways the Catholic Church in Stafford tried to fight secularisation and ‘leakage’ of Catholics from the faith. This post looks at one specific example of the Church’s social role which at first sight seems trivial but is nevertheless an indicator of the search by some Irish Catholic families for respectability and integration with the host Catholic population. These were the soirées that became a major part of the Catholic social scene in the decades before the Great War.

Stafford’s Catholic elite had always gone in for fund-raising tea parties and similar events and soirées were a development of this. The first mention of a soirée survives from 1873 when 250 people attended a tea party, concert and ball in the Shire Hall in aid of ‘St Austin’s and St Patrick’s poor schools’.[1] None of the participants’ names was given and we don’t know whether these were already regular events. The next newspaper report of a soirée dates from 1886, but thereafter the press covered them because they had become major events in Stafford’s social calendar. Almost all the later soirées were held in the Borough Hall (opened in 1877) and the basic format was that proceedings began with a tea party, the trays of refreshments being provided by subscribers either directly or by monetary donations. The local paper usually listed these people and the evidence is a good guide to the respectable people and families who organised the events. Most were Catholics, but not all. The soirées were yet another example of the overtly anti-sectarian stance of Stafford’s elite. Although the Catholic priests always attended, and the Stafford-born Bishop Ilsley came in 1891, the soirées were social rather than religious events and non-Catholics came in significant numbers.[2] The current mayor and civic dignitaries normally attended even though the mayors were all Protestants until 1907 when Dr E.W. Taylor became Stafford’s first Catholic mayor.

Stafford Borough Hall, opened 1877 and the normal venue for Catholic soirees.

Press reports usually gave the numbers who ‘sat down’ at the tea party and the numbers rose from 250 in 1886 to 440 in 1889 and stayed in the four hundreds until St Patrick’s mission was established in 1893. Thereafter the two churches had separate events, St Patrick’s soirée being held in November and St Austin’s in February or March. The numbers at each fluctuated between 170 and 300 in the twenty years before 1914. The tea party was followed by various entertainments and press reports often gave the names of the performers. These people were normally drawn from the church congregations and were often from a more modest social background than the aspirants who provided the tea trays. This gives some evidence of social involvement and the quest for respectability amongst the wider Catholic Community including the Irish Catholics. Dancing usually followed the entertainments, and whist drives had become part of the proceedings by 1913 when an amazing 884 people played in the ‘mammoth whist drive’ at the St Austin’s soirée.[3] By this time whist drives had become important fund-raising events in their own right.

The soirées were mainly organised in their early years by Staffordian Catholic families. There was, nevertheless, Irish involvement in the first reported soirée in the Borough Hall in 1886 and this increased in the succeeding years. The table summarises the Irish Catholic families recorded at the soirées between 1886 and 1914, but this is very much a minimum statement of Irish participation. There were doubtless others whose attendance at one time or another went unrecorded. Even so, this is a good guide to aspirant Irish Catholic individuals and families and also of their upward social mobility over time. Involvement in the soirées was one of the badges of respectability. They were hob-nobbing with the town’s elite Catholic families and potentially with other civic leaders as well. As a group, they were clearly aspirant and they were positively prepared to exploit the situation as they found it. Activities like the soirées clearly helped to promote the Catholic Church as a respectable institution at the heart of local society.

Irish families attending Catholic Soirees, 1886–1914.

Within a generation families like the Mitchells and Corcorans, active and early participants in the soirées, made the leap from unskilled impoverished immigrants to people of some substance and respectability in Stafford. They were not, of course, typical of the majority of the town’s Irish immigrants, particularly those from the Famine period. In the 1900s many descendants of the Famine Irish continued to work in low status jobs and lived in Stafford’s slum streets and yards. Even so, for some these people there was also a clear search for respectability and the soirées document this. During the 1890s members of the Carney, Concar, Dolan, Ruhall, Devlin, Coleman and other families began to appear as subscribers and performers in significant numbers. There was a gender dimension to this. Women typically organised the tea trays and often presided at the tables, though the latter was not exclusively done by women. It was female involvement with Church activities that played a pivotal role in demonstrating family identification with respectable Stafford Catholic society.

The social importance of the soirées in Stafford’s social life in the 1900s emphasised the respected position held by the Catholic Church amongst the town’s elite. In 1907 Dr E.W. Taylor, the organist at St Mary’s Anglican church, was a high-profile convert to Catholicism and in the same year he was elected Stafford’s first Catholic Mayor. The Civic Service was held at St Austin’s, and the priest, Fr Keating, made some cautionary comments on attitudes to the Church in the town when he said that

‘of course, in these days to enter the Catholic Church was not so astonishing a thing as it would have been 60 years ago. But still at the present time there were people, and people in Stafford, who would allow a man to follow his conscience along every road except that which led to Rome. And there were people – not many – but there were some still living who thought it was their duty to punish in whatever way they could anyone who joined the Roman Catholic Church. When the Mayor decided to become a Catholic he was willing to take the risks because he felt God had a claim on him. …. The citizens of the Borough had seen fit to honour him whom God had already honoured.’ [4]

This statement emphasises that the absence of violent anti-Catholicism in 19th century Stafford did not mean there was no insidious hostility in local affairs. Even so, the local elite’s anti-sectarian stance was articulated at the Civic service held at the Methodist chapel in 1909 when the preacher commented that

‘it was a pleasure to know that some Roman Catholics were present that morning. He thought that was a step in the right direction because the Kingdom of God was one.’[5]

The previous week the new Primitive Methodist mayor had attended Dr Taylor’s retiring service at St Austin’s. All of this evidence points to the fact that in Stafford there was no political mileage in public anti-Catholicism and that it could no more be a proxy for anti-Irishness in the 1900s than it had been in the mid-19th century.

In my last post on 29 September 2015 I described how the Concar family became established in Stafford and I finished by looking at the troubled and short life of Patrick and Bridget Concar’s son Martin. Martin was not their only son to die young. Their first born, Thomas, was only 23 years old when he died in 1880, and infantile and early death continued to stalk the family as it did for most others in the nineteenth century. The Concars’ seven other children had much longer lives, however, and scores of people are around today who are, through them, descended from the initial partnership of Patrick and Bridget that started in Stafford in 1854. In this post I want to trace the outline of what happened to the rest of the family. You can follow this on the outline family tree below.

Patrick and Bridget Concar’s descendants

Patrick and Bridget’s second child, John (b. 1858), left his labouring father’s background and got a job as an attendant in the County Lunatic Asylum. In 1887 he married a Stafford Protestant girl, Sarah Ann Hall, and they had two surviving children, Isabel Lucy and John Henry. The latter was born in 1891 and began work as a turner in Stafford’s engineering industry. He served with the Royal Engineers during the Great War. This branch of the Concar family aspired to ‘lace curtain’ respectability and they first lived in Tixall Road, a much more desirable area than New Street. By 1911 they had moved to the often-favoured address of aspirant middle class Staffordians, Corporation Street. Both father and son were involved in local sport.[1] They subsequently seem to have moved to Stoke on Trent.

Patrick and Bridget’s fourth son, James (b. 1861), rather went the way of Martin in his earlier years. He got into trouble for drunkenness, assault and fighting.[2] Nevertheless, he got into Stafford’s core industry, the shoe trade and, like many shoe workers, moved about in search of work. He married Mary Ann Bradnock in the early 1880s. She was born in Birmingham and it is possible James Concar was working there when he met her. The couple had ten children, of whom four were born in the shoe town of Northampton where they lived between 1889 and 1894. They returned to Stafford around 1895 and by 1901 were living in the gloomy surroundings of Pilgrim Street. Later the family lived in the South Walls area and there are numerous descendants.

Patrick and Bridget Concar’s fifth child, Mary, was born in 1863. In 1886 she married Henry Stanton, a Protestant Staffordian shoemaker, and the couple had eight children of whom six survived childhood. Their base became Friar Street, a respectable enough location in the heart of Stafford’s shoemaking north end, but Henry died in 1912 and Mary in 1914. Their son Jack was then only twelve, so he must have been taken in by siblings. There are, nevertheless, numerous descendants from this line of the family.

Edward Concar (b. 1865), the sixth child, went into the shoe trade and also married a Protestant , Harriet Sabin, the daughter of a railway platelayer. The couple had ten children of whom seven survived. Around 1890 they had a spell in Northampton but they returned to Stafford and in 1911 they were living in Whittome’s Buildings, a small terrace in Cross Street in the north end. In the same year they moved to Leicester where Harriet died in 1912; Edward died there in 1936. The children seem to have come and gone between Leicester and Stafford but most ultimately stayed in Stafford and extended the family line in the town.

William Concar, the seventh child, was born around 1868, though his precise birth date has not been traced. He had a spell in Stafford’s growing engineering industry and in 1890 was an engineer at Dormans. In that year he was found guilty of assaulting a policeman. It was said that he, along with other men, had been rescuing a man from police custody. William’s excuse was that he was trying to get his brother into his mother’s house without further disturbance, but the magistrates didn’t believe it and fined him 2s 6d or seven days prison.[3] William was still living at home when this incident occurred but we don’t know which brother he was supposedly helping. The incident clearly indicates continuing links with his siblings, however. He doesn’t seem to have made a go of engineering and by 1901 was back in the shoe trade as a packer, a low grade job that he was still doing in 1911. In 1894 he had married a Protestant woman, Julia Bickley, but they had no children and, unusually for the Concars, this branch of the family died out.

Ellen Concar (b. 1870) did have descendants. In 1890 she also married a Protestant, Richard Hodson. He worked as a putter up, a fairly menial job in the shoe trade. In 1911 Ellen was living in Cramer Street in Forebridge with her six surviving children but her husband was not in the household. Instead, he was boarding at the Star Inn in Mill Street which suggests their marriage had problems. The fact that Ellen was working as a charwoman also indicates a household in poverty and stress. There will, however, be many descendants from this line of the Concar family.

Patrick and Bridget’s final child, Annie (b. 1872), would not have known her father since he died when she was less than two years old. She had a troubled existence. She failed to get into any of Stafford’s growth industries and in 1891 was described as a ‘domestic’. She was still a charwoman in 1897 but by then she was living in London with two illegitimate children, Edward (b. 1894 in Shoreditch) and Thomas (b. 1896). We know this because on 6 August 1897 she was admitted to the Whitechapel Poor Law Infirmary and was registered as living in a shelter in Hanbury Street, Spitalfields.[4] She and the children survived the measles and then moved to Northampton where she got pregnant again. Poor Edward seems to have been placed with relatives in Leicestershire. Certainly, in 1911 he was living, as ‘nephew’, with the Ralley family in Syston and was working as a farm labourer. He seems to have lived in that area for the rest of his life and died there in 1978.[5] In February 1898 Annie brought baby Thomas to Stafford and dumped him on her mother. Bridget by this time was nearly seventy and living in poverty on outdoor relief. She was in no fit state to look after the child and took him to the Workhouse where he remained for six months. Bridget finally died on 9 September 1898, at which point Annie was brought back to Stafford and charged with deserting her child and leaving him a charge on the Poor Law Union. In court with a new one-month old baby in her arms, she said she was going back to Northampton to marry the father. She got one month in prison, however, after which she stayed in Stafford. Baby Violet lived less than a year, but Annie had another illegitimate child (also named Violet) in 1903. In 1908, when Violet started at St Patrick’s School, the poor kid was living in the Workhouse, presumably with her mother.[6] Annie later seems to have moved to Birmingham where she married a Thomas Lilley in 1916. It is not known what happened to them subsequently.[7]

A fragmented family

The sad coda on the lives of Bridget, Annie and Violet Concar is significant for what it says about the nature of the Concar family by the turn of the twentieth century. Family ties and obligations in the extended family were weak. There were dozens of relatives around Stafford in 1898, but none of them seems to have helped Bridget in her miserable final year. What determined the family’s experiences in Stafford?

Like many others, the Concars were Famine immigrants to Stafford but, unlike many arrivals from that time, they ultimately put down deep roots in the town. Patrick Concar’s earlier life in an oppressed community, on the fringes of physical-force activism and during the sufferings of the Famine could have made him resentful of the British ruling class, fiercely independent and with continuing activism in response to Ireland’s troubles. Yet we see no evidence of these attitudes in his behaviour in Stafford. He married Bridget Kenney and the couple then lived a modest, quiet life in the town. They seem to have sought relative anonymity. Though close to other Irish families in New Street and Snow’s Yard, in the first two decades there is no evidence of them being involved in the drunken violence endemic to that locality.

The Concar family had rather more problems with the second generation born in Stafford. The children must have had ambivalent identities. Growing up in the town and with local accents, we have seen that they were still perceived by some outsiders as ‘Irish’. The family was undoubtedly poor and Patrick’s death made things much worse. It coincided with the start of some typically teenage deviant behaviour. Bridget must have had real problems controlling her children, and she seems to have received no help from the Catholic Church. She perhaps never sought it, but the snobby Catholics at St Austin’s almost certainly looked down on this poor ‘Irish’ family that had no aspirations to join the Church’s social respectability. Indeed, Bridget Concar had at least one dispute with the Church. In 1880 she claimed that her children had been excluded from St Austin’s School because they had not brought the money to pay extra fees demanded by the School that were beyond those stipulated by the Stafford School Board. The priest ‘conferred’ with the school managers and reported that ‘the statement made was absolutely devoid of truth as the children were not sent home for any reason whatever.’[8] It is impossible to know what really happened but the incident shows there was no love lost between the Concars, the School and the Church.

The Concars’ adherence to the Church was limited. For many in the burgeoning family it was nominal, restricted to commemorating life’s key events and attending Catholic schools. They took no part in the Church’s social life and they mostly seem to have rejected the ‘lace curtain’ pretensions of parish activists. Although some descendants married in Catholic ceremonies, others did not and it is remarkable that all of Patrick and Bridget’s children married (nominal) Protestants. The Concars were, in other words, the sort of family in danger of ‘leaking’ from the Church.[9] Although there were subsequent unions with Stafford Catholic families such as the Dales and Elsmores, no Concars ever married into other Irish immigrant families. This emphasises their rapid integration into the Stafford working class. That integration was helped by descendants finding work in Stafford’s main industries and generally showing modest upward occupational mobility.

Despite what the local newspaper said, the family’s Irish identity weakened rapidly. When Bridget died in 1898 the Famine generation and its trauma disappeared from the family. Continuing identification with an Irish heritage was very much a matter of individual decision rather than family pressure.[10] Indeed, individuality was one of the emerging characteristics in the expanding Concar family. Patrick and Bridget’s nine children ultimately went their separate ways and there appears to have been little contact or kinship amongst their descendants, even those living in Stafford. By the second half of the twentieth century the various branches of the family had fanned out into local society and beyond. Patrick Concar and Bridget Kenney had indeed founded a remarkable dynasty. In the course of their lives, through their work, their social life and their marriages, their descendants slipped into the world of Stafford’s working class and emerged in the twentieth century as a generally aspirant but scattered family. They had a substantial Irish heritage but by then little conscious Irish identity.[11]

In my posts on 3rd March 3 and 11/26th August 2015 we saw how Patrick Concar from Co. Roscommon was among a group of seasonal harvesters who, in 1845, were caught bringing guns back to Ireland from Staffordshire. He somehow escaped imprisonment and when the Famine struck he was forced to settle back in Stafford, the area he already knew. He was not alone. At least three Concar family members came to the town but today’s surviving line is descended from the partnership Patrick established after his arrival. The second generation of Concars were all born in and grew up in Stafford. Their lives were often problematic, but by the end of the nineteenth century the family had become part of the Stafford working class.

In 1851 Patrick was a labourer working at Tillington Farm on the northern outskirts of the town, whilst his brother William had arrived and was nearby at Creswell Farm. In the 1850s their brother Martin also came to the Stafford area with his son Edward. William and Martin did not ultimately settle, but Edward stayed on, doing farmwork and labouring until his death in 1891. He never married.

On 2nd October 1854 Patrick Concar married Bridget Kenny at St Austins Church. She is not recorded in Stafford before her marriage to Patrick. He perhaps already knew her from home, but equally he may have met her in the lodging houses of Stafford.[1] Their union was one of a wave of marriages that occurred amongst young exiles from the Famine struggling to rebuild their lives. The newly-married couple settled in New Street in Stafford’s north end and the family continued to live there until Bridget’s death in 1898. They began at No. 47A. They were forced to take lodgers to pay the rent but they were not running a lodging house. In 1861 another Irish family, the Burkes, was sharing the dwelling with them. Later in the 1860s they moved to No. 61 New Street and they lived in that house for over thirty years. It was one of the smallest and most miserable dwellings in the street, and across the back yard lay Startin’s Court, an unsavoury group of three even smaller cottages. The row of houses from 61 to 69 was wholly occupied by Irish families and their descendants. Even so, it was by no means a ghetto. English neighbours lived at no. 59 next door to the Concars, whilst all the houses opposite – less than twenty feet away – were occupied by English families.

New Street where the Concars lived. The photo was taken during the Coronation celebrations, 1953 (courtesy of the late Roy Mitchell). The Concars lived in one of the houses on the left in the middle distance.

It seems that Patrick and Bridget did their best to make No. 61 New Street a stable and decent home. Although they were living in modest circumstances, they began a process of direct involvement with Stafford life – they did not remain ‘outcasts’ from it. Children started to arrive and in the early years work, home and domestic life must have been the focus of their existence. There is no record of their doings before 1868. This negative evidence suggests they steered clear of trouble and, in particular, largely avoided the drunken disorder common in nearby Snow’s Yard. Patrick got the vote under the franchise reform of 1867 and in 1868/9 he voted Liberal both times. The two elections of 1868/9 saw Stafford’s usual outbreak of bribery, intimidation and violence and Patrick was amongst many from the mob who found themselves in the magistrates’ court – no great crime in the run of Stafford’s elections![2] His activities show he engaged with politics, though the fact that the dominant election issue was the disestablishment of the (Protestant) Church of Ireland also suggests Patrick’s continuing attachment to his homeland and to Irish causes.

By 1872 the Concars had nine children. They were growing up in the heart of Stafford’s working-class north end, and once they reached their teenage years they started to get into the sort of scrapes common at that age. In September 1872 Thomas, the first-born (1857), was arrested for being drunk and disturbing the peace in Foregate Street. It was said that he was supplied with drink by some Irish labourers from Red Cow Yard at a house in New Street.[3] The newspaper reported that Thomas was ‘a decent-looking Irish boy’. During this period the Staffordshire Advertiser often referred to ‘Irish Rows’ and identified specific individuals as Irish. Although the paper did not go beyond this to explicit anti-Irish hostility, the steady drip of ethnic labeling must have contributed to the stigmatization of working-class families of Irish origin. In Thomas Concar’s case this Stafford-born lad was branded as ‘Irish’ by his parents’ origin, by where he lived and the company he kept. We can see why aspirant Irish families sought respectability by avoiding areas and associations that would lead to such stigmatization.

The Concar family’s life changed radically in 1874. With the decline in farmwork in the late 1860s, Patrick was forced to shift jobs. He became a general labourer and got a job on the railway. In May 1874 he was working on the main line tracks to Crewe at Madeley station north of Stafford and was run down and killed by a train. Bridget Concar suddenly had to support her extensive family on her own. With no father at home, the teenage children got into further trouble and life at No. 61 became stressed and difficult. Less than a year after Patrick’s death his son Martin (b. 1859), described as ‘a disreputable-looking youth from New Street’, was in court for assaulting ‘a little girl’ named Elizabeth Reddish.[4] No details were given but it was probably some sort of sexual assault. Even so, Martin got away with just a 5s. fine or 14 days in prison for the offence. It was, nevertheless, a portent of further trouble. In the next three years Martin was imprisoned twice for theft and also had a conviction for drunkenness.

In the 1880s Martin went the way of many a poor youth and joined the army, but by 1887 he was back in Stafford. In that year he married Julia Simpson, the daughter of a Staffordian shoemaker and a Protestant. Marriage did not tame Martin Concar. In 1888 he was in court again for drunkenness, assault and theft.[5] The end was near, however. The couple managed to have one child, Thomas (b. 1888), but Martin died in 1890 after less than three years of marriage. Julia and Thomas were forced to go back to her parents in Sash Street, and in 1892 she married Charles Bates, a local shoemaker. Thomas was brought up in the new household as his stepson but he kept the name Concar and went on to found an extensive line of the Concar family that is still represented in the area today.[6] This demonstrates how a family’s thread of life can be stretched very thin but still survive and prosper.

In the next post we shall see what happened to the Concar family in the long term.

[1] A Kenny family settled in Stafford in the 1860s and it does seem to have originated in the Galway/Mayo/Roscommon area. It is impossible to say whether Bridget Kenney came from the same family, but it seems likely, and it might explain why the later Kenny household came to Stafford from East Anglia.

[2]Staffordshire Advertiser, (SA), 9 January 1869 et seq. The newspaper refers to a ‘Michael’ Concar, but there was never a person in Stafford recorded by that name. The evidence points to Patrick and the two names are a common combination.

[3]SA, 7 September 1872. The report said he was supplied with drink from the Red Cow Inn, but a week later the paper corrected this to ‘Red Cow Lane’.

The last post looked at the miserable conditions in the Castlerea area in the thirty years before the Famine. This week we look at the ways in which people and families could deal with their poverty and helplessness. There were five main things they could do: emigrate, work in local trades, work in the public services, do seasonal work elsewhere or take direct action against their oppressors. Some people, of course, did more than one of these things.

Emigration was the least popular option before the Famine, and local reports suggest few people left the Castlerea district for destinations overseas. The 1836 Irish Poor inquiry reported that the largest numbers were leaving from the land-hungry parishes of the grazing lands in Roscommon, but even here the biggest total in three years was only 50 from Tisrara and Taghboy parishes. In most of north-east Galway, south-east Mayo and north-west Roscommon ‘none’ or ‘few’ people had left, although 58 were noted from Dunamon in Co. Galway and 20 families from Tibohine in Roscommon. The 58 from Dunamon had been ‘assisted’ by their landlord, Sir George Caulfield. This was the only clear case of ‘landlord-assisted’ emigration reported in the whole district, and the people who left were ‘all of the poorer class’. It was not the general picture, however. Most of the poor could not afford the fare and many of those leaving were ‘of rather a decent description’ (Tuam), ‘a publican’s family’ (Kilmovee), ‘two families (Protestants) … of the class of small farmers’ (Estersnow and Kilcolagh), ‘pensioners’ (Kilkeevin) as well as ‘some tradespeople and a few of the gentry’ (Fuerty).[1]

Most of Castlerea’s overseas emigrants went to America, a few to Canada and in only one case was Australia mentioned. The evidence suggests that the Catholic, often Irish-speaking, poor were reluctant or unable to leave and that the emigrants came disproportionately from the relatively better off Catholic sub-tenants, farmers, artisans and small gentry, as well as Protestants. The picture does not seem to have changed much in the ten years before the Famine.

The second way people could get out of poverty was theoretically by working in local manufactures, handicrafts or services. There was no industrialised manufacturing in the area. Work in the domestic linen trade would have been an option as late as 1820, but by the 1830s the flax and linen trade was dead.[2] It was an example of the deindustrialisation that hit Ireland after the 1800 Act of Union. We saw in a recent post (28 July 2015) that Patrick Corcoran from Tibohine adopted the most feasible approach, that of getting a trade. He became a joiner and went to the town of Castlerea. It was still a pretty miserable existence, however, and in 1834 it was stated that, in Castlerea, people in trade were often forced to beg.[3] The poverty of people in the area meant most could not afford the services of craft workers and the opportunities for escape that way were limited.

A superficially good way off the land was to join the army or the police. This path meant, however, breaking with close knit family ties based on the land economy. Such individuals were forced to enter the ‘modern’ world of state organisation and control and they had to make a radical shift in basic attitudes and identities in the process. Given the British state’s colonising status and policies in Ireland, its servants recruited from the ethnically Irish population inherently faced conflicts between the value systems inherited from their family backgrounds and those from their new employers. Whilst, for some, service in the forces and police heightened their Irish nationalist identity and provided them with valuable military or paramilitary training, for most it was just a route out of poverty that meant acceptance of, or at least acquiescence to, the ideologies and rituals of the British Empire. We saw in a recent post (10 July 2015) how John Ryan had followed this route out of Ireland but had ended up in Stafford poverty-stricken and disturbed at the end of his army service. In 1830 42.2% of British army soldiers were Irish-born and typically they were Catholic, poor and from a rural background.[4]

Similarly, young single men could leave grinding poverty on the land by joining the police. The development of state power through the forces of law and order culminated in the founding of the Irish Constabulary in 1836. Before the Famine about sixteen per cent of the Constabulary’s recruits came from Connacht – from areas like Castlerea – and the majority were Catholic farm labourers. Recruitment to the police meant both leaving the land and leaving the district, since they were not allowed to serve in their county of birth to divorce them from the influence of local relatives and associates.[5] In many cases men who started in the Irish constabulary subsequently moved to the new forces in Britain, the Empire and America.

Service in the forces or police was, therefore, a significant way in which young men from Castlerea and the west of Ireland could break out of their impoverished and insecure existence, but only a minority could take that route. The main way people could make money to pay the rent and keep their families fed and housed was by seasonal work elsewhere, particularly in Britain. It was also the main route by which the connections were made which ultimately led to permanent emigration before, during and after the Famine. Seasonal migration developed after 1815 over a good deal of north-west and north-central Ireland, but particularly in the overpopulated parishes of north-west Roscommon and adjacent parts of Mayo and Galway. Perhaps the clearest picture was painted in the parish of Kiltullagh where Thomas Feeny, the Catholic priest, reported that

‘there are 1,320 families in this parish; I may say all of them poor. One and sometimes two men out of each of the most of these families go periodically to England or to Leinster, but more frequently to England, to obtain employment’.

In Kilkeevin (covering Castlerea) ‘hundreds leave their dwellings’, whilst in Templetogher and Boyounagh, Co. Galway, about 700 went away ‘of whom 300 go to England in harvest time’. The picture was similar in adjacent parts of Co. Mayo, where, for example, correspondents from Kilcolman, Kilmovee and Castlemore reported substantial numbers going to England.[6] These were men like Michael Byrne who, in the summer of 1841 lodged in the stable loft at a farm in Baswich near Stafford, Moses Cummings in the poultry house on Ingestre Estate or Dominick Dooly, John Gallagher and Michael Mullony in barns in Hopton parish.[7] Patrick Featherstone from Ballintober almost certainly arrived in Stafford in the same way. Having planted their potatoes they would set off in time to be in England for the hay and grain harvests. Most walked to Drogheda or Dublin, but on the way back some with money in their pockets could use the packet boats of the Royal and Grand Canals from Dublin.[8] Such extravagance was probably rare, however. Staffordshire, along with Cheshire and south Lancashire, was an attractive area to look for harvest work since it was relatively close to Liverpool. The county was but one of the many destinations in Britain to which such seasonal migrants went, but the connection with workers from the Castlerea area seems to have been particularly strong.

A final reaction to the problems people faced was through direct and violent action. In the first half of the nineteenth century the Castlerea district saw a lot of rural unrest.[9] In 1795 the Defenders, influenced by the United Irishmen, carried out acts of violence in Roscommon and it is clear the main issue was already rents and access to potato land.[10] Between 1813 and 1816 agrarian secret societies – the Threshers and Carders – carried out attacks on landlords and middlemen, and the millenarian Rockite movement was active at the same time. The crisis conditions after the Napoleonic Wars produced the Ribbon uprisings of 1819-1822, and the parish of Moylough has been called the ‘nerve centre of Ribbonism’ in north-east Galway, partly because of the arrogant stance of the local land-owning rector, the Rev. John O’Rourke.[11] There were significant Ribbon actions in Castlerea, Oran, and Tibohine during the same period.[12] The adjoining districts of Co. Mayo were generally quiet during the Ribbonite uprisings, but increased poverty there in the 1829-31 period led to large assemblies of people gathering to protest over rent levels and the lack of conacre land.[13]

The conacre movement, often allied to opposition to tithes for the Church of Ireland, flared intermittently across the whole district in the 1830s and it culminated in the Molly Maguires of the mid-1840s. The Castlerea district of Roscommon was a major focus of assemblies and direct action to seize the hated grazing land and turn it into conacre plots. ‘County Roscommon had reached a heightened pitch of agrarian class conflict on the eve of the famine’[14] and this led to seasonal workers bringing back arms from England, including Staffordshire. In the post of 3 March 2015 we saw how Patrick Concar and his associates were arrested at Athleague carrying ‘guns and pistols as perfect as if [they were] out of a military barrack.’[15]

In sum, the Castlerea district before the Famine was a land of burgeoning poverty, misery and violence, and the desperate need to earn enough to survive forced many individuals and some families to leave the area either for seasonal work elsewhere or permanently. Many of the seasonal workers went to Staffordshire, some to the Stafford area, and the contacts built up there were valuable when the Famine disaster struck.

[1] ‘Some had received a little assistance’ in Roscommon parish, but from whom was not stated. Royal Commission on the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland, 1836, Appendix F, questions 30-32.

[2] The number of beggars in Castlerea in 1834 was stated to be double that of ten years previously, partly due to the loss of the flax and linen trade. Parliamentary Papers 1835, Vol. XXXII Pt. 1, Appendix to the First Report of the … Inquiry into the Poorer Classes in Ireland, Baronial Examinations, Ballintobber Barony, Kilkeevin Parish, p. 511. In 1832 Weld wrote that at the Castlerea market ‘linen yard formerly sold in considerable quantity but with cessation of demand the supply stopped, Isaac Weld, Statistical Survey of the County of Roscommon, (Dublin, R. Graisterry, 1832), p. 480 and pp. 682-4.

[6] PP1835, First Report … Poorer Classes, Answers to questions relating to the relief of destitute classes: question 5 ‘what number of labourers are in the habit of leaving their dwellings periodically to obtain employment, and what proportion of them go to England?’

Many of Stafford’s Irish immigrants came from an area of about 20 miles radius round the town of Castlerea in Co. Roscommon. This week’s post looks that area before the Famine because it was the terrible conditions there that led to the migrant connection between Castlerea, England and Stafford.

Castlerea is about 32 miles north-west of Athlone and 40 miles north-east of the city of Galway and is close to the borders of north-east Galway and south-east Mayo. Today the landscape of the area is unremarkable, even monotonous. In the low-lying hollows raised bogs developed and spread to cover large parts of the district. Outside the bogs there was fertile land, and the lowlands east of the River Suck on the edge of the district contained some of the best grazing land in the west. Nevertheless much of the area was of inferior quality – bog-strewn, treeless and gloomy. Today the district seems quiet, remote and thinly populated, but it was not always so. In the first half of the nineteenth century the Castlerea district was densely peopled and home to thousands of poverty-stricken families.

The key to this situation was the land system. In the seventeenth century the assertion of Protestant dominance over Ireland after the rebellion of 1641-52 and the Williamite victory in 1690 meant local Catholic landowners had all or substantial parts of their estates confiscated, the land going to Protestant adventurers, officers and soldiers, incoming Catholic landowners who had been dispossessed in the east of Ireland and, finally, merchant families from Galway city (the so-called ‘tribes’). Many of the surviving Catholic families, though not all, later became Protestants. By the early nineteenth century most landlords in the area cared little about their land as long as rents continued to roll in. Where landlords were absent the management of their estates was usually put in the hands of agents or the land was rented out on long leases to middlemen. Agents were often incompetent, corrupt and oppressive and many lazy landowners adopted the second course, and renting out blocks of their land on long leases to middlemen. For the mass of the population it was a pernicious system. In 1832 local writer Isaac Weld wrote:-

“the principal cause of distress [in Co. Roscommon] may doubtless be traced to the injurious practice of granting leases for long terms. …. Landlords in chief have lost power and control, being little more than receivers of rents on their estates. …. It is by the petty landlords that the mischief is done; themselves under-tenants to others, perhaps three or four deep, and in many instances but little removed from the condition of those whom they oppress or grind.”[1]

The middleman system meant a hierarchy of tenants with each layer paying the profits of the layer above. After 1815 the Castlerea district, in common with much of rural Ireland, entered a period of acute economic and social crisis. At one extreme in the Castlerea area there was a relatively small number – perhaps 2,000 – of commercial farmers whose fortunes were determined by the market economy of Britain and Ireland.[2] They occupied about one fifth of the land. At the other extreme vast numbers of people – about 250,000 – lived in a more or less subsistence economy. They desperately needed land on which to grow basic foodstuffs, above all potatoes. The two groups interacted. The farmers and landowners needed the labour power of the subsistence peasants whilst the latter needed wages or labour service to pay their rents, tithes and for goods and services. Barred from the best land, they had to compete for the poorer lands, bog margins and bogs not occupied by the commercial farmers.

There was a hierarchy of tenants in the competitive struggle for scarce land. This is that can be demonstrated by families whose members later settled in Stafford. In 1825 Darby Dolan rented 78 acres in Tibohine parish to the north of Castlerea.[3] This was a substantial holding, and Dolan was probably doing quite well. He doubtless sublet some or all of it to those doing less well. In other words, Dolan was a middleman and the Dolan family could well have been local power brokers. It was this that meant the immediate landlord of most Catholic sub-tenants was likely to a fellow Catholic. In contrast, in 1833 Patrick Cuncah, or Concar, rented 88 acres south of Castlerea in Boyounagh parish.[4] It was a similar-sized holding to Darby Dolan’s in Tibohine but here the similarities ended. Concar was part of a “company” of tenants who leased land in partnership and were part of the clachan and rundale system of communal farming settlements that had expanded in the west of Ireland since the seventeenth century. The system was both a response to, but also helped sustain, Ireland’s massive population growth since it allowed dense occupation of marginal land based on the intensive production of the potato for food and turf from the bogs for fuel. As the population rose land holdings in the clachans were divided and divided again and new clachans established on even more marginal areas.

Potato plots and cabins, Co. Roscommon (Illustrated London News)

In the nineteenth century landlords began to break up the system and replace it with direct leases to individual small-holders. In 1833 Thomas Raftery & Co. continued to hold 23 acres in partnership in Kiltullagh parish west of Castlerea but Pat and James Raftery leased 31 and 32 acres individually, and most of the extensive Raftery clan’s holdings in the parish were individual.[5] At Cloonfad in Tibohine parish four members of the Corcoran family were also individual tenants of five or six acre small-holdings. Co-partnerships could be of minute size. In Moylough parish, Walsh & Co. rented just four acres between them in 1837, but that in turn was bigger than the minute plot rented by John Featherstone at Knockroe in Castlerea in 1832 – just one fifth of an acre.[6] People like Featherstone were at the bottom of the land hierarchy in the Castlerea area.

The growth of population sustained by potatoes grown on marginal land, together with the shift from communal land holding to market-driven individual tenancies, produced a massive and tragic army of landless people. Although the big estates and grazing farms needed labour available on demand there was never enough paid work to sustain even a fraction of the available labourers or keep individuals in work all the year round. In 1836 only about one in ten labourers had any sort of regular employment and 8d a day was the maximum they could expect to earn.[7] Such families still needed ‘conacre’ land on which to grow the potatoes essential to survival. Under the system of conacre minute plots were rented just for the season to provide a subsistence crop, and by the pre-Famine period the landless were so desperate for conacre that landlords and middlemen routinely charged exorbitant rents for it. In 1836 conacre in Templetogher and Boyounagh parishes was costing up to £8 an acre, whilst in Kilkeevin (Castlerea) £9 9s was charged for the best land and £6 6s for bad and moor land.[8] By 1845 rents of £13 an acre were reported in the district.[9] Tenants were usually unable to pay all their rent with hard cash and that meant their labour that was essentially available free on demand to the landlords or their agents. In 1826 Gibbon wrote of

“Big Dick Irwin, who was agent to the Dillons of Belyard, in this county, [who] for forty years got his turf cut, saved and finally left in his haggard, and his potato and other requisite labour done without one penny of expense through the whole year – a gross imposition on the tenantry of this weak absentee family.”[10]

The rents charged for conacre were also extortionate because it was at the frontline of the conflict between the expansion of commercial farming and the land hunger of the mass of the population. Landholders became increasingly reluctant to let land for conacre. This kept prices up, and the rent spiral was worsened because there was no open system of conacre land valuation. It was merely let to the highest bidder, and since demand outran supply tenants were competing with each other, thus forcing prices up.

The three decades from 1815 to the outbreak of the famine were crisis years for the mass of people living in the Castlerea district. The end of the Napoleonic wars brought agricultural depression. Prices tumbled in the livestock and produce markets and tenants of all classes, but especially the poorest, could no longer afford the high rents. Rent arrears spiralled and this undermined the financial basis of many of the landlords, particularly those who had mortgaged their estates to support profligate expenditure on the basis of future income. The response of more vigorous landlords was to take direct control of tenancies, break up co-partnerships and combine small farms into larger holdings. Small tenants lost their land. In one instance the results were described by a Church of Ireland rector, Rev. William Blundell:

“In Baslick parish …. some of the tenants have gone to beg and some have got small-holdings on other estates: in Kilkeevin parish the holdings have been increased from a rood to three of four acres; those that have been dispossessed are located about Castlerea; many of them beg.”[11]

In 1845 Joseph Sandford of Derry Lodge (Tibohine parish) described the process in more detail:

“They [the landlord or agent] generally pick the best tenant; and if there is waste to the farm, or anything of that kind, they put those they cannot accommodate on the waste land, and give them the edges of bogs and so on. The country people term it transporting them; they are banished to some corner of the bog.”[12]

Population growth drastically worsened the prospects for people in the area. In the three parishes of Kilkeevin, Baslick and Ballintober the population rose from 4,821 in 1749 to 17,141 in 1841.[13] The population explosion increased pressure to subdivide holdings and worsened the hunger for land at the same time as the economic depression undermined tenants’ ability to pay the rents demanded. The population of the Castlerea area rose by a third from 186,538 in 1821 to 246,434 in 1841, and by the latter year the population density was 221 people to the square mile. Things were actually worse than this because the rural poor could occupy neither the best grazing land nor the worst of the bogs. In Kilkeevin parish, for example, the actual density on settled land was over 400 people per square mile.

Cabin in Connemara, 1880s. An indication of conditions in the Castlerea area before the Famine.

Living conditions for the mass of people were appalling. Evidence collected by the Royal Commission on the Irish Poor in the 1830s showed a picture of miserable housing and poverty.[14] The cabins in which most people lived were usually built of bog sods, mud or dry stones without mortar and thatched with any vegetation available, even potato stalks. They were cold, damp, dark and smoke-ridden. Cabins often had minimal furniture – even bedsteads were a rarity, most people having to make do with straw on the floor and with hardly a blanket to cover themselves. William Bourke, parish priest of Templetogher and Boyounagh reported that the housing was

“Most wretched, built of sods or sometimes mud, of stone very rarely; furnished? oh! Bedsteads, such as they are, very rarely enumerated, or to be found amidst the cabin furniture; a damp floor, a wad of straw or undried rushes, perhaps a sheet and a thing that was once a blanket, surmounted by the rags worn in the day, form the couch of the cabin’s inmates”. [15]

The people living in these hovels subsisted almost entirely on a diet of potatoes and often went around in rags. Thomas Feeny, parish priest at Kiltullagh, said that

“Their ordinary diet is potatoes, and sometimes buttermilk, and sometimes a salt herring; their condition with respect to clothing, is miserable; coarse frieze is what they use for a body-coat, and the coat is generally ragged.”[16]

This picture of a potato diet, with or without occasional buttermilk, eggs and salt fish, was general throughout the area, and some descriptions of the peoples’ clothing were even harsher. In Kilmovee, Co. Mayo, the priest Robert Hepburne said that “their clothing generally [is] so wretched as to render it difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain its colour or quality.”[17] In 1829 Skeffington Gibbon described the typical scene as he saw it in Co. Roscommon:

“In the County of Roscommon …. there is not in Europe a more poor and wretched peasantry. …. See the huts and the few wattles that alone prevents them from living as miserable as the Hindoos or African tribes, who have the advantage of a sultry climate; their little fire placed in the middle of a crib, supported by a few loose stones at the back – and the smoke, from the stinch (sic.) of weeds and what is called mud turf, is quite intolerable, and changes the very aspect and caps of the females to yellow hue – distorting their countenances and making their eyes a reddish colour. Their fare is nothing but potatoes, and in general not even a sufficiency of that useful and nutritious vegetable; and at night nothing to lay their weary limbs upon but a wad of straw or damp rushes generally termed a shake-down. These people suffer such privations.”[18]

At least a third of the population were living in the worst windowless one-roomed mud or dry stone hovels and conditions for the rest were little better.[19] Over 90% of the population lived in 3rd and 4th class houses; only the landowners, commercial farmers and traders could aspire to anything more.

The appalling conditions in which a majority of the people lived reflected the poverty endemic to the land and labour system. In forty parishes out of fifty two in the region the correspondents said in 1836 that the poverty of the people had worsened since 1815, and in only three was some improvement reported.[20] In next week’s post we look at what people did to survive this situation.

[7]Royal Commission on the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland, 1836: Appendix D: Baronial examinations relative to the earning of labourers, cottiers etc., (HC1836 XXXI.1): Cos. Galway, Mayo & Roscommon baronies. Responses to Q. 1, “How many labourers are there in your parish? How many are in constant and how many in occasional employment?”

[9]Royal Commission of Inquiry into the State of the Law and Practice in Respect to the Occupation of Land in Ireland (The Devon Report), 1845, Minutes of Evidence (HC1845 XXXI.I); evidence of Dominic Carr, agent to Lord de Freyne, Frenchpark, pp. 373-7

[10] Skeffington Gibbon, The Recollections of Skeffington Gibbon from 1796 to the Present Year 1829, (Dublin, 1829), p. 167

[19] In 1851 the census attempted to classify housing, dividing it into four classes:-

4th class: mud cabins having only one room

3rd class: mud cottage, 2-4 rooms and windows

2nd class: good farm house or house in s small street; 5-9 rooms with windows

1st class: all houses better than the preceding

No similar classification was adopted in 1841. An average of 20% of houses were “4th class” in the baronies of the Castlerea district in 1851, but conditions must have been far worse in 1841, since it was the poorest occupiers of 4th class housing who disproportionately suffered in the Famine. It is therefore assumed that 80% of the decline in house numbers between 1841 and 1851 was the loss 4th class cabins through death, eviction and emigration, and this suggests that in 1841 an average of 35% of houses were of the 4th class.